Shame is the business model of most churches. Understand that and so much becomes clear. Fifty years ago their pews were packed, but numbers are way down and falling as they lose source after source of shame.
So they are hanging on for dear life to the shame of homosexuality even in the face of the exuberant celebrations this week of Sydney WorldPride.
When the dancing is done, hardliner faiths and congregations will be back on the warpath against the decent proposal of the Australian Law Reform Commission that faith schools lose their right to sack gay teachers and expel gay kids.
It matters to them. It’s business. It’s influence and cashflow. Without shame like this, how can you sell forgiveness?
So many lucrative sources of shame have disappeared in the last 60 or 70 years. How can faiths recruit any more by putting the boot into single mothers and “illegitimate” kids?
Society won’t have a bar of it.
Fulminating against sex outside marriage goes on, of course. But the shame factor has been whittled away almost to nothing. It no longer fills the pews and the plate.
So the continued loathing of homosexuality and transgender matters a great deal for these operations – particularly the so-called conservative wings of the Catholic and Anglican churches and evangelical congregations here and across America.
Humans are strange beasts. In expert hands, their capacity for shame and guilt about sex is depthless. Those same experts promise their members forgiveness, redemption and everlasting life.
But first, to the depths of your soul, you must experience shame.
That gay and transgender kids kill themselves as a result with appalling frequency does not worry the shame brigade. George Pell stood outside St Patrick’s cathedral in Melbourne one day and declared the risk of gay children killing themselves was “another reason to be discouraging people going in that direction”.
He was also a great fan of gay conversion, now being energetically defended as New South Wales at last prepares to ban this particular cruelty. Try to find a place in your heart for these churches. How can they win customers unless they can keep promising to eradicate with prayer and sometimes electrodes the profound evil of homosexuality?
Church schools are both reassuring and baffling when they promise to treat gay pupils will with dignity but insist that the law leave them free to expel those kids at any time they wish. Pastoral care on one hand and, on the other, a threat of humiliation too profound to imagine.
It’s a glitch in the business model. Parents, apart from a few crazies, insist all their kids be treated decently. But the churches that own the schools insist homosexuality still be flagged in the law of the land as evil.
Candour is not a KPI of the leaders of these faiths. They don’t admit it’s good for business. They say they need to be able to sack gay teachers and expel gay kids to preserve the ethos of their faiths.
What a wonderful, lofty word. We are invited to pull back and see the big picture, to admit (and it is true) that churches are capable of wisdom, love and charity. But what sort of ethos is this that has as a key component legal dispensation to deal brutally with homosexuals of any age who come within their reach?
It’s up to us – the rag tag people of Australia, straights and gays, people of many faiths and none – to decide if the law Labor passed in 2013 should still give them this cruel privilege.
The churches say they’re fighting in the name of freedom. I hear, out in the vestry, the faint ring of the cash register.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
